First Impressions of Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition

I loved Mansions of Madness 1^st Edition. It is responsible, perhaps, for some of my best gaming memories. One game came to an end with me, one of the investigators, the supposed good-guys, turning to my friend’s girlfriend and saying the words… “I’m sorry. I have to kill you.” I had been turned by the keeper, the ruler of the house, to betray the heroes and the look of shock and horror on her face was utterly priceless. Another game saw us, having drunk a few beers, starting the set up for a particularly complex scenario at 10pm. We finally finished playing at 3am. It was, appropriately enough, insane.

Mansions of Madness was always tremendously fun but certainly had it’s flaws: it was incredibly fiddly, with ludicrous piles of cards, a nightmarish set-up time and a degree of linearity to it that left you feeling that you were really just following a trail of breadcrumbs around this great cardboard house. And yet it told the best stories, created the feeling of a grand mystery, and offered some moments of incredible Lovecraftian horror.

But when I heard that a 2^nd edition was coming, and that it did away with the Keeper in favour of an app I was worried. Did I want a fully cooperative experience? Part of the appeal was in knowing how intelligently the monsters would act. That, after all, makes them far scarier. In this new edition, throughout the first scenario, they just charge blindly after you.

That said, the app is otherwise amazing! No longer do you need to completely build the mansion to begin with, instead you start with just the entrance hall with a pile of tokens to investigate. The rest of the house remains a mystery that steadily reveals itself as you explore! You never know what might be behind the next door, in the next drawer you check. Sometimes you’ll come across a puzzle, but where once was a pile of cardboard pieces to play with, now you have a puzzle appear on the app. The scope of this system is fantastic and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here!

The mythos phase, in which the house fights back against the interlopers, is much faster, much smoother, and just as threatening with strange events afflicting your investigators, even if it is just a series of random tests. But I do miss that tangible threat from a great Keeper. Inevitably these events, or the monsters will see you taking damage and this system is really great. Each wound or mental shock is represented by a card, but certain effects in the game will make you flip these to reveal some horrible effect as the wound intensifies. Carrying wounds is an on going threat but do you have time to stop and heal?

The other great innovation that comes through the app is the combat. Here, you just click on the monster you wish to fight, select the type of weapon you’re using and the app tells you what happens (and what dice to roll). It’s fundamentally the same system you had in the 1^st edition where a huge stack of cards had to be searched through. The thematic nature of this system was always its strength, and the app streamlines it so that this element can finally shine through.

But now we need to talk about the dark horror that pervades throughout all discussion of this game, the Shoggoth in the room if you will. The price. The original Mansions of Madness was really quite good value, a great pile of content with all the miniatures and cards and everything else. This new edition though, comes with less stuff, fewer scenarios and a vastly inflated price. The miniatures don’t even have the same level of detail! Now it’s hard to make a judgement on how much the app cost to develop; that has to be included in the price. But at £90 for only 4 scenarios… I mean it’s still cheaper than T.I.M.E. stories and it’s certainly a damn sight slicker. But it’s much less than the originals 5-15 (with the story variants available).

One of the coolest things of the original edition, however, was the great amount of fan made support for the game, including a vast list of scenarios. With one fell stroke the app has swept all of this aside. Will there ever be a scenario generator? One can only hope but for now the only hints of more content comes in the form of new box sets with the 1^st edition miniatures. 1 scenario with each inevitably expensive box. That’s just not good enough! I thoroughly enjoyed my first play of this game, but I wouldn’t really be keen on buying it…